HCL Technologies - collaborative organisation structures

 

   I met up yesterday with Vineet Nayar, CEO at HCL Technologies who has just written a book, Employee First Customers Second.

Although most of the book deals with this EFCS approach (human capital management, in my language), the book does touch on the importance of social connection too.

For example, Vineet writes about the power of fusion:

“Once we transfer the ownership of our collective problems for the supposedly all-powerful CEO to the employees, people… suddenly see the company as their own enterprise.  They start thinking like entrepreneurs.  Their energy quotient leaps up.  And when that happens with a critical mass of employees (usually, 5 or 10 percent is all you need) throughout the company, it creates a kind of fusion – a coming together of the human particles in the corporate molecule that releases a massive amount of energy.”

He explains that he is also attracted by the idea of a Starfish organisation – one which is decentralised, with every major organ replicated across each arm.

 

Vineet’s book describes some of the activities HCLT have already been undertaking to unleash this fusion:

• A social network called U&I that employees can use to ask questions to Vineet and has since been extended with My Problems – an opportunity for him to share his concerns with HCLT employees.
• An updated 360 degree review system which allowed anyone to give feedback on a manager and to then see the results of that manager’s 360, replacing zones of control with spans of influence
• Communities called Employee First Councils around health and hygiene, art, music, corporate social responsibility and dozens of other issues including business related passions such as a particular technology or a vertical domain area, which allow people to enhance their personas at work, brining the whole person, as well as the person’s families, into the culture of the company.
• My Blueprint, another social networking system allowing managers to share plans for their specific business areas and get feedback from another 8000 HCLT managers, including people above and below them in the hierarchy.

 

I asked Vineet if there were any other actions HCLT is taking or has planned to further develop its peoples’ connectivity:

 

Stars and Spheres

Vineet described three organisation structures.

The first is the traditional pyramid with its apex at the top.  This is the sort of organisation developed armies when the Commander realised he was only 1 soldier in 500 soldiers so began enabling people down there at the bottom of the pyramid. It was also the organisation structure in the HCL Technologies organisation – they forgot that organisations needs commitment to work and created an HR organisation.

The second model is an inverted pyramid which reflects the value of work that’s undertaken. There is value in both of these two pyramids eg there’s still value in hierarchy.  You need a control structure – it’s when this assumes control over things you can't control that you get a problem).   So you put the two pyramids together and end up with a star in which a manager is accountable to their employees and the employees to the organisation.

In the third model (pictured), the organisation starts engaging every employee in the star organisation – in which employees are involved in 8 or 9 activities related to their own interests so you have these concentric circles around employees.

In the future, if we were to have this conversation again in another 5 years, Vineet suspects he will be drawing a sphere in which these communities have assumed more importance than either of the pyramids.

 

Social change

We talked a little about Social Advantage too.  Vineet suggested that my thinking around the value in connections, not the individual alone, but about collaboration of employees creating value, is absolutely right.

But he also suggested a need to turn theoretical idea to practical issue happening now.

For him, this is about the growth of emerging markets and therefore changes in the demographic pool of customers – becoming younger, based in emerging economies, with girls doing better than boys.  Everything is changing.

Peoples’ influence zones are changing – because of things like Facebook.  Advertising no longer influence what, how or where consumers buy.

Communities are now behind buying decisions.  It’s a very important change.  People are only just finding out how to engage communities to come and buy products.  How do you influence people to take things back into communities of value?

50% of the world are now under 25 years old.  This means we need to learn to create value through collaboration, through communities like Facebook.  In the future, this will be the only way that business will be able to grow.

 

 

Also see my post on HCLT’s employees first approach at Strategic HCM.

And you can read Vineet’s blog posts at vineetnayar.com or blogs.hbr.org.  You can follow him on Twitter at @vineetnayar.

 

Technorati Tags: Vineet Nayar,CEO,HCL Technologies,Employees First,Customers Second,book,collaboration,social,networking,spider,starfish,fusion,U&I,360,Employee First Councils,My Blueprint,organisation

 

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Chasing Stars and Socialism

 

   I didn’t manage to do any posting on the World Cup prior to England’s demise (I was leaving it to the finals!) although I did manage one tweet during the match we did play reasonably well in (can’t remember who it was against now which shows how much I like football):

“How can a team of people perform so differently at different times? #england (the value of performance improvement vs performance management”

 

I was really just thinking about how much peoples’ performance can change in a short period of time, and the range of subjective and intangible factors which contribute to the difference.  Hence performance improvement.  And then contrasting this with measuring and ‘managing’ performance (as in performance management) which I don’t think can contribute as much.

But I could have been referring to the performance of the team, as I think all those factors that make performance improvement difficult for individuals and magnified significantly for a team.  I though this article by Lane4 in Human Resources magazine summed it up quite well.

But not as well as this (from the Evening Standard):

“According to former England winger John Barnes, South American success and Fabio Capello's failure in South Africa can be explained by one thing. Socialism.

"Football is a socialist sport," he explains. "Financially, some may receive more rewards than others but, from a footballing perspective, for 90 minutes, regardless of whether you are Lionel Messi or the substitute right-back for Argentina, you are all working to the same end.

"The teams which embrace the socialist ideology rather than having superstars, are the teams that are successful. Or if there are superstars they don't perceive themselves to be that. That's why I use Messi as an example. As much as he's a superstar he respects his team-mates and their collective efforts."

"Players from other nations when they play for their country are once again a socialist entity, all pulling in the same direction," he tells me from a dressing room at Supersport's studios where he is an expert analyst on the World Cup. "The most important thing for every Brazilian player is to play for Brazil.

"It doesn't matter if he plays for Milan or Manchester United. A Brazilian who puts on that yellow shirt feels the same as the man next to him in that yellow shirt. They have a humility to the shirt. It is not the same for those who wear the Three Lions."

For Barnes, the answer is simple.Whether Capello remains in charge or not, England have to start playing as a team and lose the tag of the Golden Generation.

"We have empowered our players so much that they are superstars at their clubs. Too many have been put on pedestals and treated as untouchable.

"Look at John Terry after the Algeria match. He comes out and tells you what the problem is. But he doesn't see himself as part of the problem."

"Spain has an identity. If you black out the faces and don't know who's playing, you can still say this Spain because of the way they play. You can see Brazil because of the way they play. We haven't got a method. We need to create an identity."

 

It’s not that new a point (think the Real Madrid Galacticos) but it’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard a footballer, or many a business leader, say.

And that’s why I want to do this post.  I think the general points that John Barnes makes apply just as much to business as they do to footballers – we’ve been chasing superstars as well.  And there’s a lot of evidence to suggest this works just as poorly in business as it does in football.

The best of this come from Boris Groysberg and I’m currently reading his new book, Chasing Stars.

You probably realise that I’m an avid reader, but I’ll admit I’m finding this book quite hard going and unless you’ve got a really deep interest in this research, I’d stick to Groysberg’s SMR article ‘When Stars migrate, do they still perform like Stars?’, or even just this blog post by Bob Sutton.

Basically, the research suggests that stars are only stars because of the context they work in and particularly the network (or team) that backs them up.

So do we need a more socialist approach in business too?  You’ll probably know my answer because that’s largely what this blog’s about!  But I’d be interested in yours as well.

 

Also see these recent posts:

• Talent management: collaboration and cooperation
• Promotion and salary envy

 

Technorati Tags: John Barnes,England,World Cup,Boris Groyberg,Stars,teams,Socialism

 

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Enterprise 2.0: Communities aren’t sites, they’re people

 

    The first session on communities at the Boston E 2.0 conference was part of the Black Belt Practitioners workshop on the first day:

 

Community Roles and Adoption Planning (Stan Garfield – Deloitte, Luis Suarez – IBM)

• Stan is community evangelist for Consulting at Deloitte Touche where he leads the SIKM Leaders Community with over 400 members globally and Luis is Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
• Communities behind the firewall are groups of people who share specialty, passion, interest, roles, concern, set of problems. Communities are living organisms so very difficult to manage
• Community members deepen their understanding of the topics by interacting, asking questions, sharing knowledge, reusing ideas, solving problems together, developing better ways to do things
• People join a community to share, innovate, reuse solutions, collaborate, learn from others

 

Luis Suarez started the session by explaining that whereas some people feel every group is a community, this isn’t the case.  Communities need a shared passion about a common interest.

Most of the session was the taken up focusing on Stan Garfield’s Communities Manifesto and some of the key points from this, eg that communities should be independent of organisation structure – people shouldn’t be forced to join, so that members want to be part of the community.

I particularly liked this slide examining the differences between communities, organisation sites and teams:

 

 

Luis and Stan also provided suggestions for community building programmes.

Firstly, you need to find a compelling topic.  This needs to be made interesting.

 

Most importantly, communities need to be facilitated, actively nurtured – they won’t necessarily expand naturally.  People set up communities and 2-3 weeks later find them dead - people wonder why.

We need to ask them have you engaged people?  Have you provided the opportunity for the community to have community activities?

Communities need to be nurtured ever day, every hour of the day, by engaging with them and providing a plethora of activities - including physical activities.  Web 2.0 tools aren’t enough.

They need good content to ensure good health but this is only part of the solution.  You need to focus on connections, and help people connect with each other.  Connecting people with content and other people.  Focus on the interactions between people.

 

One key question is who is going to lead the community – and this could be several people  - these need to have passion for topic and time to build and sustain it.

When selecting a leader it’s useful to watch peoples’ communications.  Who are the hubs / connectors / mavens?  Who do people trust? – go to for advice?

But note, the best conversation leader may not be best facilitator.  So they’ll need coaching and up-front training.  And you can then have a community of community leaders.

 

Another interesting point was that lurkers are valuable.  Without them, we often wouldn’t have a community.  And they may eventually move from being passive consumers to active producers.

 

Communities generally manage themselves, ie the “we” eg if people post inappropriate content.  It’s not something the community manager needs to get involved in.

 

You can never communicate enough about a community, eg communicate to the community what is happening in the community.

And cross-pollinate across communities.

 

Note, because of the differences on the slide above, particularly I guess the lack of a clear purpose, managing a community takes more effort than managing a team.

However, it is potentially more valuable as well.  Communities provides a reason to stay in the company – they reduce attrition rates.

 

Of course, as Luis and Stan noted, communities have always been there - for decades.  We all have a very natural need to participate in communities – we want to bond with people.

But I’m not sure they’re often that actively created or managed in most organisations…

 

I thought this was a really engaging and interesting session.  While the presenters were talking I was thinking about a community that I’ve been ‘managing’ recently – called ‘Moon Shots’ this is a ‘community’ of 250 management regades bought together by an interest in Gary Hamel’s writings on management innovation.

Only it’s not really a community – a result of me not really managing it.  So I’m probably not going to continue it when ning changes its conditions next month. 

Yes, I’ve got the passion, but I’ve been a bit short of time.  And I’ve never really thought that much about my role - so these guidelines from Luis and Stan would have really helped as well.

 

 

Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/20adoption

Follow my posts from the conference at bit.ly/e20conf.

 

Technorati Tags: Stan Garfield,Deloitte,Luis Suarez,IBM,community evangelist,SIKM,Knowledge Manager,Community Builder,Social Computing Evangelist,manifesto

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Social Learning (Talking HR 020)

 

   So Talking HR is finally back with a new show on Social Learning.

What’s that?  Well, in the show I started to define social learning as something more than just the use of social media to support learning.  But I’d now like to elaborate on this (I didn’t want to go on about this before or this one point could have taken over the whole show).

My main point is that learning has always been social.  So social learning can’t just be the application of social media.  But it has to be something different to what learning has been before.

This is a similar argument to the one I’ve used t suggest that HR 2.0 and management 2.0 are approaches aimed at the development of social capital.

And I’d suggest that learning 2.0 is probably about social capital as well.  But I think it’s about one form of social capital in particular – and this is ‘the learning organisation’.

I read somewhere that when the learning organisation first became popular (via Peter Senge and others), it wasn’t really achievable.  Social media has made it much more so.

But I’d suggest that there’s an important distinction between learning that uses social media, and learning that aims to create a learning organisation.

The other way of looking at this, which I also mention on the show, is that when we talk about social learning, we really should mean social learning, ie learning of the social unit (the team or the organisation as a whole) and not just learning socially (generating, co-creating and sharing content, collaborating etc).

It should be about developing a common understanding, a common way of doing things, a new culture even, between people in a team.

This is the real reason that social learning is so important.

 

I also attempted to link Honey & Mumford’s learning styles with Li and Bernoff’s social technographic profiles (the ladder from Groundswell – pictured).

 

 

Listen to the podcast and read the show notes at Blogtalkradio.  You can download the podcast to your hard drive or play it streaming from the web.

Subscribe to the show at itunes.

Talking HR is hosted by Krishna De and Jon Ingham and you can contact them with your thoughts and feedback about the show at talkinghrpodcast(at)gmail.com.

 

 

This post is cross-posted at Strategic HCM.

Technorati Tags: Social learning,learning organisation,Talking HR,podcast,Blogtalkradio,Jon Ingham,Krishna De

 

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Netflix – Enterprise 1.0 or 2.0?

 

Culture

View more presentations from Reed Hastings.

 

Netflix’s culture of freedom and responsibility has been addressed on quite a few blogs, including Strategic HCM, and on other social networking sites, including the Moon Shots ning.

But it’s comments on the company’s open culture and predisposition to the use of social media – and particularly whether this makes it an example of Enterprise 2.0, that I want to address here (for examples of these comments see Fast Forward and Bertrand Duperrin’s Notepad).

And I just don’t see it.  A great company – absolutely.  Enterprise 2.0 – no.

 

To me, this is an example of the ever growing and largely unhelpful use of the ‘2.0’ tag that I’ve just posted on.

Enterprise 2.0 isn’t just about using web 2.0, but it’s not just about anything new, innovative and exciting either.  It’s about creating an environment where the value of social capital: the connections, relationships and conversations in a business, is taken seriously.  And I don’t see any of this at Netflix. So:

“Few organizations are more able to access the power of the collective than Netflix”? – I just don’t see it, sorry.

 

The presentation suggests the company does work as a team – but stresses that this is a pro-sports team, not a kid’s recreation team.  And definitely not a family.  To me, even though they want to avoid brilliant jerks (recognising that the cost to teamwork being too high), it doesn’t even sound like a real pro-sports team. This impression is strengthened by the description of their ‘loosely coupled’ approach. It sounds like a group of highly talented individuals (“stars in every position”). Perhaps the business equivalent of the Madrid Galacticos?

There’s also the issue about the impact of not investing in recruiting and therefore having to fire people, that I touch on at Strategic HCM.

The presentation notes that high performance people and effective teamwork can be in tension as these people have strong opinions. This supports Boris Groysberg’s conclusions that a focus on recruiting stars can be bad for business.  But I’m not at all  sure that Netflix has has revolved this dilemma sufficiently.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Netflix,Enterprise 2.0,Bertrand Duperrin,Fast Forward

 

 

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More on Ctrl-Alt-Del

 

Over the next couple of days, I'm going to be continuing the series of posts on the 'global reset' that I began earlier this month:

• Corporate social responsibility in the global recession
• HR's main responsibility
• Innovating in the downturn
• HR in the spotlight: banking bonuses
• Sexism in the City
• Ctrl-Alt-Del: your comments.

 

Firstly, I've been thinking about my response to Jo, who challenged me to think more clearly about the changes I believe may be coming.  However, although I've thought about this in a couple of different ways, I keep on coming back to a diagram I used in my Digital HR webcast with Knowledge Infusion,  and another webinar with Kennedy Information, last year.  This is it (slightly updated):

 

 

 

The diagram suggests that two key factors associated with the business context (the competitive environment, and new technology), and another two factors linked to the employment relationship (the demands of the organisation, and changing expectations of the individual) are influencing workforce attitudes.

 

• In terms of the environment - globalisation; increasing focus and importance given to human capital; and also to internal diversity, supporting increasing external diversity (of customers, partners etc) are leading to increased sensitivity and intelligence in approaches to business.
• Organisation pressures focus on the increasing proportion of work which is knowledge-based, and also the proportion of knowledge that is included within 'non-knowledge based roles' (it's becoming increasingly difficult to identify roles in which knowledge isn't now a key component).  This means that work is increasingly intangible and leads to increasingly disparate levels of performance between the strongest and weakest employees., therefore emphasising the role of talent management.  And knowledge work can be done anywhere, so virtual teaming is increasingly important.
• Individual pressures focus on what I call 'millennial expectations' which are especially evident in the millennial generation, but I think are also increasingly prominent in the rest of us as well.  These expectations are supported by a desire to be treated as individuals, with our own identities and needs for self-actualisation, but also a growing need to be part of a community.
• The key technological change is the growing access to, and comfort with, new media, including social networking, and web / knowledge 2.0 applications, enabling user driven content.

 

The factors impact on workforce attitudes through customer, investor and stakeholder attitudes (none of us are employees alone), and also by the recession.  This is driving some factors forward (for example - talent management: we need to get much better at understanding what good performance really looks like, and rewarding it effectively), and constraining others (for example, millennial expectations - people are increasingly happy to have a job, and forgetting about their desire for meaningful work).  However, the greatest impact of the recession is to increase the attention we're giving to this whole picture, which has the potential to increase the rate of change, regardless of the strength of the individual forces.

And here are some of the changes I think may result from these forces.  This diagram is still very much work in progress, but is the best answer I think I can give to Jo.

 

 

• Culturally intelligent management is a response to the increasingly global, diverse environments in which many firms now operate.  It implies an increasingly sensitive, empathetic and personalised approach to people management.
• Conversation based development recognises that the key improvement tool in a knowledge based environment is the conversation that people have which each other, and attempts to increase the quality of the conversation in order to improve business performance.
• Transparent communication is a result of the use of social media - if you're reading this, you recognise the effect.
• Team orientation is a response to the increasing expectations of the workforce - it doesn't ignore the individual, but focuses on individual within a social context (individual and team at the same time).
• All of this is based on relationships based on trust, or it doesn't work at all.

 

There you go, Jo.  I hope it helps - any suggestions?

Of course, I still don't know whether the 'global reset' will actually encourage these changes to take place, and will come back to this question over the next few days...

 

Technorati Tags: Global reset,recession,change,workforce expectations

 

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Witty's Number

 

According to Management Today, new GSK chief exec Andrew Witty has proposed that "instead of the existing seven large global centres, GSK’s hunt for new drugs should be tackled by many more, much smaller teams – a maximum of 80 scientists per group, in fact".

The rationale is apparently that:

"The new model is based on the assumption that smaller, more dispersed teams will naturally tend to pursue a broader portfolio of products. Each of them may be rather less lucrative than one of the old blockbusters – which are anyway getting much harder to find – but the damage caused by one of them failing will also be a lot less traumatic. Less of a roller-coaster, more of a gentle drive in the country."

That makes sense, although I think there's something about the smaller number too.

When I was an HR Director at Ernst & Young, we started to organise our audit teams into groups ('stables') of 50-80 too, in order to improve collaboration within teams.  A group of 80 would include up to 10 managers and we felt that this was about the maximum number of people who could work well together, and through them, bring the full group of about 80 people together into a cohesive team.

Dunbar's analysis may suggest we can network effectively with a slightly higher number of people that this, but I think for real, effective focus and team working, 80's about right.

 

Technorati Tags: Management Today,Andrew Witty,GSK,smaller teams,Dunbar's number